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Slow Compiz performance with 8800 GT

02-05-2008, 02:13 PM

Hi there.

I just got my new Gainward 8800 GT, and chose nVidia because I had heard so much praise of their drivers (or actually just the lack of complaining).

The weird thing is, that even with this card being a lot more powerful than my previous card, Radeon X1950 Pro, it has a pitiful fps when running Compiz. If I remember correctly, I had several hundreds of fps in Compiz. Now I get 60 fps tops, and when having the cube transparent or lots of windows open it drops to 30 fps.

Other annoying thing is playing Flash videos; it flickers like hell. you can easily see the border between the previous frame and the new one as the card is drawing it. And this happens when Compiz is off too.

The drivers should be correctly installed, I have direct rendering, Nexuiz runs fast and smooth with ultimate settings, and there are no error messages in Xorg.0.log.

Any ideas what might be causing it?

Then theres one more problem. I'm using Mandriva 2008.0, and after I had manually installed the nVidia drivers (the .run installer), by mistake I had Mandriva install the driver packages, too. Now I have the driver installed twice, and also have two "Nvidia X settings" shortcuts in the Tools menu.
So I'd really like to be able to remove the manually installed driver as I think the packages will be easier to maintain. Could someone give me instructions how to do that?

Btw. the 2 drivers installed -problem is not causing the compiz performance -problem, as it existed even before I had installed the second driver by mistake.
And yes, I have uninstalled all previous ATI drivers.

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Yet the performance issue remains...
Has anybody had same kind of experiences?

EDIT: Got the flash video playback smooth by enabling the RENDER -option... but Compiz is still patheticly slow.

EDIT: The problem seems to be in AIGLX, as running Compiz with XGL is about 1700 fps, and when turning the cube 500 fps... but I'd reeeally prefer AIGLX instead of XGL, so I'd like to get this solved.

One more EDIT: interesting, adding --indirect-rendering when starting compiz improves the performance, by going as high as 360 fps with about 60-80 fps when rolling the cube. Now this is fully usable, but still it makes me wonder why I have to use compiz --replace --indirect-rendering ... doesn't --indirect-rendering mean that it will use AIGLX? Shouldn't it use AIGLX by default? And why am I getting even a lot higher performance in XGL?
Mysteries. Or just my ignorance, either way

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Well, Mandriva doesn't install fusion-icon with the packages, but I did try it with compiz --loose-binding ... it adds some 1500 fps with the --indirect-rendering used :P thanks a lot. But minimizing windows and adding new tabs in Opera still lags like hell...

EDIT: woah, even weirder things going on... if I have a download running in Opera, it lags like hell too. All the time.

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Disable refresh rate detection and Vsync and manually set the refresh rate to a multiple of the refresh rate you're currently using. For example, my monitor is running at 60 Hz so I set it to 120 Hz. This way I get a really smoothly working compiz with my very low-end IGP (GeForce 7050). Obviously you'll see some tearing due to disabled Vsync, but it's not that bad, really.

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Disable refresh rate detection and Vsync and manually set the refresh rate to a multiple of the refresh rate you're currently using. For example, my monitor is running at 60 Hz so I set it to 120 Hz. This way I get a really smoothly working compiz with my very low-end IGP (GeForce 7050). Obviously you'll see some tearing due to disabled Vsync, but it's not that bad, really.

I'm pretty inexperienced with the Nvidia driver, so I can't find the options to do that... neither in GUI or command line.
I'd need some more details